The industry has been turned on its head since Financial News launched the European capital markets FN100 Most Influential list in 2005.

In the inaugural list, there were three fixed income specialists in the top five, reflecting the domination of bond sales and trading desks in the investment banking industry at the time.

Goldman Sachs ruled the world and Michael Sherwood had just been appointed co-chief executive of its UK and European subsidiary Goldman Sachs International, when Financial News named him the most influential person. He was described at the time as a “soaraway superstar” and a “master of the universe”.

Ten years on, after remarkable periods of turmoil, regulators have established themselves among the most influential forces in European finance. A regulator has sat at the top of the list for the past four years. Regulators take up three positions in the top 10 in this year’s FN100 list.

It is impossible to say who has been the single most influential person over the past 10 years. The industry is too diverse to compare the merits of a chief executive of an investment bank with a superstar trader or with a private equity manager. However, we have, of course, tried.

Using one metric, Mario Draghi, president of the European Central Bank, could claim the honour – he has come top of the list three times in a row, more times than anyone else. However, having never appeared on the list before 2010, he would be an unsatisfactory choice.

With a weighted score metric – where an individual scores 10 points if they come top of the list and one point if they come 10th – another banker could claim to be Financial News’ most influential person: Anshu Jain. The current Deutsche Bank co-chief executive scores 58 points under this weighted metric, beating Draghi, who would be in second place with a score of 47, and Sherwood, who is third with 43 points.

Jain was a key figure in Deutsche Bank’s transformation from German commercial bank into global investment banking powerhouse and is credited with having steered the corporate and investment bank through the 2008 debt crisis relatively unscathed.

Jain’s consistency is all the more impressive given that he was effectively promoted out of the FN100 in 2012 when he became group chief executive of Deutsche Bank and we changed the CEO category to be purely focused on heads of investment banks in Europe.

There is a third metric to decide the most influential over the past 10 years – overall number of appearances. And there are only three people who have had the staying power to have appeared in every FN100 list since 2005. They are Michael Sherwood; Alan Howard, who has built Europe’s largest hedge fund manager Brevan Howard; and Michael Spencer, who has set up the world’s largest interdealer broker, Icap.